Brad DeLong's Egregious Moderation

Patrick Appel: Minding The Store The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

Minding The Store: As always, it a pleasure to step in while Andrew gets some much needed rest. Guest-blogging is not all that different than my day-to-day activities on the Dish – 24 of the 50 posts currently on the front page were written by me. All the substantive posts are Andrew's work, but it's my and Chris's job to read through the blogosphere and pick out the choicest bits. Andrew edits, approves, and spins what we find, but the illusion of an all-reading blogger is maintained by employing two extra sets of eyes...

Sean H.'s Proposed Classification of Comments

Making Light: Latin obscenities meet comment-order preferences:

I propose the following order for comments:

1. Those posted by Cory Doctorow;
2. those made in reply to a troll;
3. those containing five or more hyperlinks;
4. astroturf;
5. others;
6. those in terza rima;
7. clever ones;
8. those invoking Godwin's Law;
9. those breaching the blog's comment rules.

Clay Shirky on the Columbia Daily Tribune

Rescuing The Reporters « Clay Shirky: Now the half-dozen reporters covering the City Council and local crime instead of antiques and sports don’t do their work in a vacuum. The city desk editors and the copy chief make the work of Janese Heavin et al. more valuable than it would otherwise be. But you can pick any multiplier you like for necessary editorial and support staff and that number, times six reporters, won’t be a big number. In particular, it won’t be 59, or anywhere near it.

This is, I want to emphasize, the staff for a pretty good paper, in a competitive market. (Ann Arbor, another midwestern college town and just a bit larger than Columbia, doesn’t have a metro daily at all. And there’s nothing wrong with reading your horoscope or being reminded by Granny that May really is one of the nicest months of the year. Anyone who wants to read that stuff should be able to.

But it’s not news, and it’s not hard to do, and it’s not hard to replace. No one surveying the changes the internet is bringing to the newspaper business is saying “My God, who will tell me about Big 12 football! Where will I find a recipe for spicy chicken wings!” What matters in the Tribune, and what’s at risk, is Terry Ganey’s work on a state coverup of elevated levels of E. Coli in Ozark lakes, Jonathan Braden on anti-gay protesters from Kansas picketing in Columbia, Jodie Jackson’s reporting of on a child molestation case against a local politician.

For people who see newspapers as whole institutions that need to be saved, their size (and not the just the dozens and dozens of people on the masthead, but everyone in business and operations as well) makes ideas like Coll’s seems like non-starters — we’re talking about a total workforce in the hundreds, so non-profit conversion seems crazy.

All that changes, though, if you start not from total head count but from a list of the people necessary for the production of Jones’ “iron core of news,” a list that, in the Columbia Daily Tribune’s case, would be something like a dozen. (To put this in perspective, KBIA, Columbia’s NPR affiliate, lists a staff of 20.)

Seen in that light, what’s needed for a non-profit news plan to work isn’t an institutional conversion, it’s a rescue operation. There are dozen or so reporters and editors in Columbia, Missouri, whose daily and public work is critical to the orderly functioning of that town, and those people are trapped inside a burning business model. With that framing of the problem, the question is how to get them out safely, and if that’s the question, Coll’s idea starts to look awfully good.

Sydney Padua: Lovelace and Babbage: The Style Edition

2D Goggles » The Style Edition: Man, you know everyone on earth gets their fifteen minutes of fame when even lowly cartoonists get interviews.  My Deep Thoughts on steampunk and the universe, over at Tor.com! I make one extremely contraversial statement in that interview that is bound to set off a firestorm.  That is:  the fashion of the 1830s is hideous. Here at 2dgoggles we pride ourselves on our strict historical accuracy on all points save one.  And on that one point, I feel myself entirely justified.  There is just no way I’m going to draw clothes like these....

[T]he comic unfortunately coincides with the absolute nadir of western fashion in the last 500 years.. what are the odds! Babbage, seriously, you’re a statistician– what are the odds??! Ghastly proportions, nasty pointless detail, huge lapels.. I swear to god, it wants only polyester.

I’m doing what I can to keep the clothes bearable.  This means going for a generic-olde-fashioned-dress for lovelace, with a vague nod to the bizarre lozenge-shape bodices.  No power on earth can save the men’s jackets of this period but anyone can look good in a poofy shirt and a waistcoat (can we bring those back?  because they’re stylin’). Mind you, much of the time I’m just going to have to throw everything out the window and put Lovelace in trousers, not only because she would totally have worn them if given half a chance, but as Marian Halcombe puts it in “The Woman in White”- “In my ordinary evening costume I took up the room of three men at least.”

Yeah, no kidding, Wilkie Collins.   You try composing a comic panel with three women having a conversation in skirts five feet in diameter.  By the way– it seems like everybody knew everybody else in Victorian England, but sadly there is only the slimmest of connections between Wilkie Collins and Ada Lovelace– his father met her once and described her as delightful and simple-minded.  It’s a shame they never met as I have a feeling they would have gotten on like a HOUSE ON FIRE.

We do have some info on both Babbage and Lovelace’s dress sense: in true geek fashion, it seems to have been terrible.  Sources: Babbage: the waistcoast story. I darkly suspect Babbage would have been a Hawaiian-shirt-wearer.. not to throw a cloud over his memory or anything. Ada Lovelace: awkward, badly dressed geek.  -this is a recollection of Lovelace’s visit to her father’s old estate the year before she died;   it is typical of her in this anectode that she goes through two entirely different personalities in the course of three days (speaking of clouds over memory, I should say that the actual extent of Ada’s racing losses were around 3000 pounds, as far as scholarship can determine.).  There are surprisingly few contemporary descriptions of her; see seems to have been rather reclusive.  You can see everything I’ve found regarding her from the period online here (the entire list of my primary sources is here).  From “bouyant and hearty” to “melancholic” to “haughty and arrogant” or was she “without an atom of pride”?   “She had, indeed, a most variable personality”, wrote her first biographer Doris Langley Moore.. indeed!

Anyways, doodling away on “The Organist” but won’t make any promises as to time.. Giant Monsters being what they are and all.  In the meantime, any nagging questions re the comic, I’ll make this an ‘any questions’ post.

Sydney Padua: Lovelace and Babbage

2D Goggles » Lovelace--The Origin

Ada, Countess of Lovelace

Maureendowdsemailfriend@gmail.com on Greg Mankiw on Yoram Bauman and Superfreakonomics

Mankiw writes:

*More on Superfreakonomics * Most people who know Yoram Bauman think of him as the funniest economist around. But he is also very knowledgeable about the issue of climate change, and unlike some economist-bloggers, he is not a bomb thrower. So when he says he is disappointed in the Freakonomists' chapter on climate change, it is worth taking seriously. See his analysis here. See his correspondence with Steve Levitt here.

Let's reinterpret this. Paul Krugman and Brad Delong correctly identified that these guys are wrong, which they are. I dislike them so I will call them a name and then achieve the usual plausible deniability by linking to someone who happens to say they are right.

Sophomore on Unfogged on Civilization

Unfogged: Comment on iPhone Woes: 120; CivIV. I bought it from Direct2Drive, which was a mistake because I couldn't get rid of it permanently. I deleted it from my harddrive, but then it was always there on D2D waiting for me, only a click away.

I went through that one three times, but think I'm free of it now...

Erick ShonfeldHow The iPhone Is Blowing Everyone Else Away (In Charts)

How The iPhone Is Blowing Everyone Else Away (In Charts): esterday at the Web 2.0 Summit, Morgan Stanley Internet analyst Mary Meeker did her annual data dump slide presentation, this year focusing on the growth prospects of the mobile Web. As usual, there were 3 or 4 slides that really captured the trends she was talking about, particularly the ones around iPhone adoption and how that phone in particular is catapulting mobile Web usage into the mainstream.

You can see her full slide show below (all 68 of them), but let me pull out the three iPhone slides that helps put its growth into perspective. The first one above shows the growth of data traffic on AT&T’s mobile network. It is 50 times higher than it was just three years ago. I added two arrows to show when the first iPhone launched in June, 2007 and the iPhone 3G in July 2008.

AT&T saw massive pops in data usage following those two launches as consumers discovered the unadulterated mobile Web for the first time. And it is not just the iPhone. With the ubiquity of WiFi, the iPod Touch offers pretty much the same experience without AT&T’s monthly fees. Taken together, the adoption of the iPhone and iPod Touch is outstripping the early adoption the desktop Internet, as represented by AOL and Netscape in Meeker’s chart below. It is also outstripping the early growth of NTT Docomo’s imode, which was the most successful example of the first generation of mobile Web adoption in Japan.

The chart overlays the first 20 quarters of user growth for each product. Only eight quarters after launch, the iPhone and iPod Touch has more than twice as many users (57 million) as imode (25 million), five times as many as Netscape (11 million), and eight times as many as AOL (7 million) at a comparable points in their histories.

The iPhone/iTouch combo is also the fastest-growing consumer electronics product of all time. Its adoption ramp is even steeper than videogame consoles including the Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DS, and Sony PSP. The original iPod and Blackberry aren’t even in the same league.

Philip Elmer-DeWitt : Windows 7

What's wrong with Windows 7 - Apple 2.0 - Fortune Brainstorm Tech: PDATE: Kudos to reader Jon T. of Cardiff, Wales, for digging up this quote from Mossberg's review of Vista:

"After months of testing Vista on multiple computers, new and old, I believe it is the best version of Windows that Microsoft has produced." — Wall Street Journal, Jan. 18, 2007

"After using pre-release versions of Windows 7 for nine months, and intensively testing the final version for the past month on many different machines, I believe it is the best version of Windows Microsoft has produced." — Wall Street Journal, Oct. 8, 2009